Paul returning from a 'dining experience' at the Wood Grill Buffet

With essentially a month to go until classes started, Pat and I started to explore C’ville a bit before our schedules would be completely devoured by our studies. It is, of course, a ‘college town,’ but one very different from Durham, New Hampshire. C’ville has a permanent population of nearly 40,000, and a road (Route 29) that cuts right through it (and cuts the campus in half, as well). Route 29 is, when inside the city limits, about five miles long, straight as an arrow, and resembles a gigantic strip mall with literally hundreds of business outlets along its length. It is all very convenient, but also just one step short of being ugly. In places 29 is four lanes wide, in each direction, and many C’ville drivers on it know only two speeds -- stopped but idling, or 80 mph! Red lights are not always taken very seriously, either. During our stay we saw numerous accidents on 29, and there were two people run-over and killed on it (one dead body was still on the side of the road as I drove into classes one rainy morning). I found 29 very scary, as bad as anything I experienced driving the Los Angeles freeways in the 1960s and 1970s, and I soon grew homesick for Durham’s boring, pokey old Main Street.

But C’ville is not without its charms. It has a neat Downtown walking mall (the several ‘chain’ malls, however, with all the usual franchise clothing stores, are minimalist places and pale in comparison to the Fox Run Mall and Newington Malls), lots of movie theaters, literally hundreds of places to eat (although curiously not a single Mexican or Italian restaurant was worthy of the name), and an Amtrak station. There is also a very nice regional airport just ten miles outside of town, off of Route 29, that offers commuter service to Washington/Dulles, and the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh airports. Pat and I used it twice to fly up to New Hampshire, once at Christmas to see our new, third grandchild and first grandson, and again at Spring Break when we finished the final purchase details of our new home in Newmarket.

During August, however, we spent most of our time exploring the C’ville eateries. Outside of town, the rustic Michie Tavern (eat like a weary 18th century traveler) and the elegant Boar’s Head Inn (eat like a 21st century fat cat) are not to be missed. All-you-can-eat buffets, on the other hand, are big inside C’ville and one, in particular, The Wood Grill Buffet, was just three blocks from our house. It was cheap, and oh-so-good! I turned into an eating machine (Pat had far more will-power), and our kids would have been embarrassed to see their father give a good imitation of a hog trying to pass as a man. One fellow we met while standing in line for our turn at a three-foot high pile of steaks told us “The secret of this place is to eat through the initial painful bloating with slow but steady chewing.” At the time, that made complete sense to me! Pat later told me it was essential for my survival that we left C’ville when we did; I now understand why the cardiac unit at the University of Virginia Medical Center has a world-wide reputation -- the doctors there have so many buffet-stuffed patients to practice on. And that’s how August passed, and then school started.

Fall semester (now ten pounds overweight and rising) I taught the first-year UVa grad course (EE611) in probability, random variables, and stochastic processes (through the Karhunen-Loéve expansion of periodic processes, and the Wiener-Lévy process), taken by all of the EE grad students going into signal processing. In addition, many grad students from other tech majors took it as a way to satisfy the grad school math requirement. All together, there were 19 students in that class. I was very impressed by the quality of those students, particularly the foreign-born ones. Because I was, for administrative reasons, assigned to Professor Steve Wilson’s Signal Processing Group, teaching that course seemed like a natural selection. Steve, who is Associate Chair of the EE Department, later told me he thought it all went pretty well (and the student evaluations, while not uniformly grand weren’t awful, either).

EE611 was particularly good for me to teach, as it gave me a first pass at getting ready for our EE939 -- statistical theory of communication -- here at UNH (which I will be teaching in the fall), as well as one last chance to student-test some of the problems in my new book The Duelling Idiots and Other Probability Puzzlers that Princeton University Press is publishing in September. That book -- it’s already listed on Amazon.com -- based on my years of teaching EE647 to UNH EE undergrads was written before I arrived at UVa, but I did all of the final work of reading and correcting page-proofs and preparing the index while at UVa. Princeton did a great job with my history of complex analysis math book -- An Imaginary Tale -- a couple of years ago, with translations in Japanese and Russian, and I am very happy to be doing this new book with them.

The first semester I also taught three problem-solving recitations of the first circuits course (EE203) taken by UVa EE undergrads (the equivalent of our EE541). There were 100 students in that class. The UVa approach is to teach circuits by showing how Kirchhoff’s laws can be used to understand why integrated circuit chips can be designed to run at hundreds of megahertz in a PC. It is an innovative idea (we used a very nice textbook co-authored by the professor-in-charge, Michael Reed), and *I* personally learned a lot -- I am not sure, however, just how much the students learned. We gave pretty short shrift to Thévenin’s theorem, hardly any time to ac-power and none to 3-phase calculations, and there was also no exposure to any analog circuit simulator (such as Electronics Workbench). High-tech may be the latest buzz, but even with Tesla nearly 60 years in his grave I think electrical engineers should still know how the balanced 3-phase distribution network that powers all those PCs works! My office was continually full of students desperately looking for help, not in the neat CMOS technology stuff discussed in main lecture, but in simply how to properly set-up and solve network equations. I am convinced, too, that very few of the students really understood how to handle initial conditions in an RLC-circuit.

From what I observed, our UNH undergrad EE program is the equal of UVa’s -- if I have to choose one or the other, I would give a slight edge to UNH if only because our smaller enrollment allows a more intimate educational experience for students. (The UVa graduate program in engineering is highly ranked by US News & World Report.) In addition, my year at UVa convinced me that it is a mistake to have a department too spread-out physically; the population density drops below a critical interaction threshold and people simply don’t ‘connect’ except by chance or in a scheduled meeting. At UNH EE hums, while at UVa EE is awfully quiet.

When not on the UVa campus during the day, I was usually over at PVCC (ten miles from the center of C’ville) with Pat in the evenings -- I worked on my writing while she was in class. PVCC itself is a very nice place (at times, I thought I was on the set of “Happy Days”), but we did have a few scary moments driving home at 9:30 at night on I-64 through the Virginia countryside. It’s a road consisting of just two types of stretches after the sun goes down; either absolutely pitch black, or as brightly lit as the Las Vegas Strip with literally dozens of closely-spaced road signs telling you how to get to every little burg within a hundred miles of C’ville. The signs are so numerous and confusing on those stretches that there might as well be none. And most odd of all, there is no sign indicating which way to go to get to C’ville itself. We learned how to get home in the dark by trial and (a lot of) error!

Second semester I had the opportunity to teach in the TCC Department (Technology, Culture and Communication) that is fully-funded out of the Dean’s Office in SEAS (School of Engineering and Applied Science, the home college of EE and UVa’s equivalent of CEPS). The TCC faculty are all tenure-track, usually holding their Ph.D’s not in engineering or science but in history, moral ethics, philosophy, and so on. (At least one TCC faculty member does have a tech Ph.D. -- Kathy Thornton, a physicist and Assistant Dean for Graduate Studies, as well as a former astronaut who flew on four Space Shuttle missions including the one to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. When she teaches the physics of flight, the students listen!) TCC is a really innovative concept, and in my conversations with the SEAS Dean (Richard Miksad), when we’d bump into each other in a hallway, I was impressed with his total educational and financial commitment to TCC. Every SEAS student must take four TCC classes in his/her four-year career at the school, with one being a TCC200 level class like the one I proposed and taught (“The History of Radio” which started with Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory of the 1860s and ended with commercial broadcast radio in the 1930s).

The closest we have to TCC at UNH are the campus-wide Honors INCO404 seminars, open of course only to honors students. As with an INCO404, there is a huge amount of reading in a TCC course (we read and discussed two long historical books), writing (my TCC200 students each wrote three 750 word minor papers and one 2,500 word major paper), and speaking (students had to give a 20-minute talk on their major paper). With 24 students, I was pretty busy just reading their 96 papers, never mind the quiz-grading and oral evaluations. The TCC students (mostly not EEs) were terrific, a wonderful bunch of young people. Most of them did excellent work, and here are the titles of some of their major papers: “Radio: Setting the Path for Sports Broadcasting on Television”; “Black Jazz Musicians and Early Radio: The Fine Line Between Acceptance and Rejection”; “The First Amendment in Radio”; “How Amateur Radio Led to the Development of Radio Astronomy”; “Radio and the Internet: History Repeating”; “Radio Sound Effects”; “Alan Freed, Payola, and the 50s Teen’s Rock and Roll”; “U.S. Navy Involvement in the Development of Radio”; and “How Technology, Money, Power, and the Public Shaped the Future of Edwin Armstrong’s FM Radio.” Don’t those titles sound like interesting reading? They were!

I had a great time doing the course, and plan to propose “The History of Radio” as an INCO404 for here at UNH, to add to my earlier INCO404 courses (“The History of Complex Numbers” and “Time Travel”). As a personal benefit of teaching the radio course, it helped to clarify in my mind many of the historical issues treated in the second edition of my book The Science of Radio (with MATLAB and Electronics Workbench illustrations) that I finished at UVa at the end of May. Springer-Verlag/New York will publish it next year.

Heaviside, Maxwell, and Paul plan the trip home.

So, how does UVa compare to UNH? The two are similar in size and campus appearance (if you consider Durham’s Main Street analogous to C’ville’s Route 29, which is a fair stretch!) Parking at both schools is terrible. Diversity debates at both are intense (UNH is/isn’t ‘too white’ while at UVa there is/isn’t a double standard for admissions). Both schools, in my opinion, place far too much emphasis on football and football players. But there the similarity ends. UVa is ranked by US News & World Report as the #2 public university (#22 among all universities) and UNH is in the #45 public university spot (still not too bad). UVa has Schools of Architecture, Law, and Medicine, which of course UNH does not. The UVa Board of Visitors (equivalent to UNH’s Board of Trustees in lawful function) is very supportive of its faculty. I found that delightful. Our Board says that it does the best it can given its ability, but actual results seem much more evident in Virginia. I simply could not help but notice that in all of Virginia, with its very large number of public institutions of higher learning, there is apparently no need for a Chancellor’s Office that we seem to need to ‘coordinate’ just three schools. And finally, UVa has the better football team -- but what do you expect of a university that spends over fifty (yes, 50!) million dollars on a new football stadium?

The EE Department at UVa is very different from ours at UNH. There are 24 assigned faculty slots, of which at least two seem to be vacant at any given time (there were four open slots when I arrived August ’99). There is a huge (compared to ours) turnover rate, with one person leaving each semester on average, including professional staff and young tenured faculty, such as the fellow whose office I inherited. The faculty recruiting process is continuous without break, with candidates appearing all year long about twice a month. So intense is this that during my entire stay there was no time to schedule a talk by me to the Department, even though it had a proposed presentation from me in-hand. I must admit I was disappointed in not being able to give that talk, even when several scheduled off-campus speakers cancelled because of travel problems.

The UVa/EE faculty are all, to my observation, absolutely first-rate -- not particularly surprising, I suppose, in a Department with three IEEE Fellows! They all have heavy research and grad student commitments, however, and unlike UNH they are generally not easy for undergrads to find except by appointment. As I mentioned earlier, I ran into most faculty, even those with offices just across or down the hall from mine, by chance only. At UNH the Kingsbury Hall EE corridor is almost always a beehive of activity and conversation, with many faculty doors open for spontaneous walk-ins by anybody; at UVa the Thornton Hall EE corridors are nearly always empty and lined with closed doors.

Don’t let those last words mislead you. I had a GREAT time on my sabbatical. Pat said she did, too -- she did well in her two semesters of Spanish (even I learned to say ‘hello’ in Spanish, because Pat’s teacher, Senora Nina Núñez, would greet us with a cheery ‘Hola’ at the start of each class), and received her BA after 11 years of steady, hard academic work on top of holding down a full-time job. We learned a lot. That’s what sabbaticals are for, of course -- they are supposed to be ‘difficult’! There was payoff for the future, too; it was at UVa that I found the time to prepare the proposal for a new book called When Least Is Best, a history of the mathematical theory of optimization from ancient times to the present. It will start with the original isoperimetric problems that pre-date Christ by centuries, come up through the development of the calculus of variations, and continue on into the modern theories of linear and dynamic programming. Princeton University Press will be publishing it in 2002. If I had remained at UNH this last year I would, I’m sure, still have prepared that proposal, but perhaps not without a year or more of delay.